US judge sides with Anthropic, says company supply chain risk branding over Pentagon disagreement 'Orwellian' — Trump slapped AI company with designation after it refused to lower its guardrails for the military

A U.S. court has sided with Anthropic and is temporarily blocking the Pentagon from calling the company a supply chain risk. The ruling comes after the AI tech company sued the Department of War for designating it as such, after the military’s demand to bypass the firm’s AI safety policies was refused. According to the Associated Press, the U.S. government argues that it should be able to use the AI tool in any way it deems lawful, but U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said that her ruling was not about how the Pentagon wanted to use Claude, but its response when Anthropic refused to give in to the department’s demands.

“Nothing in the governing statute supports the Orwellian notion that an American company may be branded a potential adversary and saboteur of the U.S. for expressing disagreement with the government,” Judge Lin wrote in her decision. She also added, “If the concern is the integrity of the operational chain of command, the Department of War could just stop using Claude. Instead, these measures appear designed to punish Anthropic.”

This issue stemmed from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s refusal to allow the use of Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Amodei said that the government can purchase information on the average American from data broken and then use AI to turn all these data points into one cohesive profile without requiring a warrant, and that he wouldn’t allow his company’s tool to be party to that operation. Aside from that, he said that AI isn’t ready to be deployed in fully autonomous weapons because it cannot make judgments like humans. “We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk,” the Anthropic chief said.

The company’s decision to go against the Pentagon’s demand brought the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump. “THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS,” Trump posted on his platform. He also wrote, “Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all of Anthropic’s technology.”

Still, the company is fighting back, filing cases against the administration and arguing that the “supply chain risk” designation violated its First Amendment rights and also did not give Anthropic due process. Judge Rita Lin’s decision is a win for the company, but it isn’t over for Anthropic, as this is just a temporary block. Aside from that, the company also has another case filed against the government waiting to be heard in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

"The Constitution does not allow the government to wield its enormous power to punish a company for its protected speech," Anthropic said in its court filing. But in the meantime, OpenAI has struck a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its AI models on the military’s classified network.

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